While it won't crack the top 10 ranks of the TOP500 anytime soon, the powerful supercomputer is expected to be put to use providing more accurate weather forecast, designing drugs, and designing better body armor.

UF immunologist David Ostrov comments, "HiPerGator can help get drugs get from the computer to the clinic more quickly. We want to discover and deliver safe, effective therapies that protect or restore people’s health as soon as we can. UF’s supercomputer will allow me to spend my time on research instead of computing."

HiPerGator uses AMD Opteron CPU cores. [Image Source: AMD]

The university will share its new computing wealth with joint projects with other top institutions around the country.

All the major server vendors - IBM, HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. - have off-the-shelf servers that can be stuffed with GPUs. Plus, there are lots of people who can write decent code for GPUs, especially in the research community and among graduate students. In fact, if a university cannot find people willing (to learn) to use the latest technology, they shouldn't be building a supercomputer (using old technology) in the first place. As for being within budget, they could have opted for a system with far fewer CPUs and smaller operating costs (due to lower power usage, for example), and still end up with higher performance than the system they got.